Musicheads Essentials

Musicheads® Essentials is a web feature that gives the Current staff a chance to share some of our favorite albums of all time with our listeners. Join us each week as a different Current host or staff member picks an essential album from their collection and tells you why they love it.

Essential as breathing to musicheads and to anyone alive, Let It Be sums up the Replacements  from the iconic cover photo to the last cacophonous note. If the Replacements never recorded another song, their reputation and impact would still be massive.

"Pleased to Meet Me is the finest record The Replacements ever made," writes The Current's David Campbell. "It lands in that sweet spot where technology, team, craft, chops, guts, attitude, ideas, creativity and some major label money all intersected at the right time for those songs to become what they became."

If one listens to any one album by the White Stripes, they will hear a different shade of the band. Yet for all their elusiveness and apparent shape-shifting, the entirety of the band is really only visible on one album and one album alone: Elephant.

Led Zeppelin's influence on modern music is undeniable but... which of their LPs is essential? 1970's "III" was the last breath taken by a band who were still mere mortals, mates from the Midlands trying hard to make a career out of this fledgling rock industry.

In their brief career (1969-76), this band provided the soundtrack to my final years in high school. If the English had done Proms, me and my mates would have ended ours drunkenly singing "Stay With Me" in the middle of the dancefloor, even if the DJ wouldn't play it!

My pick this time for Musicheads Essentials is the 1980 avant-pop masterpiece from Talking Heads, Remain in Light. Written during a chapter of extreme creative exploration for the band, Remain in Light is not only considered by many to be Talking Heads' crowning achievement, but one of the greatest albums of the 1980s.